I'm having a lot of trouble getting PP to play my sequence smoothly. The footage is h.264 wrapped in a MOV container captured with my 550D (MagicLantern Firmware and 1.3x bitrate). The playback of an entire clip works perfectly fine. But when there are a lot of fast cuts, PP just chokes up and starts to stutter really bad.

I have an elitbook with 4GB of RAM, a Quadro FX 550M and a 7200 RPM hdd in this puppy so I'm not sure what the problem is. I read somewhere that I should reimport all my clips with an .mpg extension but that would be a disaster for my sequnce which is already 70% done...

Ideas?

EDIT:

I would like to note that mercury hardware playback doesn't make any difference

Based on the information given so far, my best guess is that your system just isn't up to the task.

With this kind of media, ideally you want a fast machine, with an Intel i7 model processor, at least 8GB (and preferably more) RAM installed, and at least three fast hard drives. I suspect if you had that, there would be no problem.

This has worked before with MTS files from my canon hf s10, but there were not fast cuts there. Here the cuts are at most 3 seconds long but usually a second or 2.

Furthermore I am running the latest CCCP codec pack and that's it really. No other garbage installed on here. The videos have no effects at all. Mercury GPU and Software give exact same result (software seems a little better) and this happens in all resolutions when I preview.

Don't know if this will help but if you never shoot, you will never hit anything.

Rewrap the .MOV files in a MTS wrapper (leaving the H.264 codec intact). It may be that this step will avoid the 32 bit QT server and its inherent slowdown.

I'm not familiar with the CCCP codec pack, but when I hear the word 'Codec pack' I almost get a severe heart attack. Most of the time it is disastrous, requiring a complete reformat and reinstallation of OS and programs.

Basically when scrubbing you need really fast disks and it appears you do not even have the practical minimum of three physically different 7200 RPM SATA disks installed. One disk will not do.

I did not think that such high specs would be necessary to edit DSLR footage... iMove has no issues whatsoever with this and i'm running that on a 2009 MBP. This is also not a movie editting computer. It's just a school computer. I just do this for fun. I got PP for a crazy discount since I'm a student. I'll try rewrapping it though.

Just a wake-up call: DSLR is one of the most difficult codecs to handle. It really requires a beefy computer. Second, and that is where a lot of people make mistakes, is that editing requires a lot of disk I/O and the problem with SATA disks is that the connection is half duplex. Traffic is only allowed in one direction at a time, it can't read and write at the same time, so in effect traffic going in one direction must wait for the traffic from the opposite direction to have passed before it can use that single lane. That always causes delays, especially when you take into consideration the Windows housekeeping tasks that also require the use of that single lane.

Just the other day I tested the required sustained transfer rates with a single track AVCHD timeline and it needed around 50 MB/s, with three tracks it went up to around 95 MB/s and with the addition of RED 4K material and some more tracks, it needed more than 300 MB/s transfer rate for simple playback. Scrubbing the timeline requires even more.

I know I can batch rename the footage, but how do i replace the footage INSIDE premiere pro. After the footage is .mpg, the files are offline and need to be linked or replaced.. Ideas? Going through 100+ clips manually is kidn of a game breaker :')